1972 Nixon visited Moscow and negotiated an Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia., and was the first sitting President to visit China, establishing relations there.

Nixon took the US off what remained of the gold/silver standard with silver coins being changed to silver-colored copper coins, and said "We are all Keynesians now," opening the door to unlimited spending and the eventual "quantitative easing" and a $20 trillion debt.

The Nixon administration declared a "war on drugs" and initiated the No-Knock Laws, co-sponsored in the Senate by Democrat Ted Kennedy, which led to the militarization of US police.

In 1973 Nixon ended conscription and withdrew US troops from Vietnam.

1976 Jimmy Carter was elected President. On his second day in office he pardoned Vietnam War draft-dodgers.

1978 The Carter administration expanded the US bureaucracy with the creation of the Departments of Energy and Education.

In 1978 the Chinese Communist Party picked free market advocate Deng Xiaoping to lead them out of their economic nightmare. It worked, and for the last four decades central command economists like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich have been chanting a mantra that the Chinese economy is overheated and about to crash, while the Chinese government loans the US money.

The link to the Reuters article in the above post no longer works. Reuters news is on my favorites bar and I take a glance at their headlines every morning. That article was headlined Chinese Economy Shines.

In searching for that article, however, I found a bunch of other recent articles saying that the Chinese economy is about to collapse.

I would expect the US economy to achieve virtual bankruptcy like the Russian Empire did, well before the Chinese economy, but we'll see.

If one can be taught to believe absurdities, one can commit atrocities. --Voltaire

Tom Palven wrote:In searching for that article, however, I found a bunch of other recent articles saying that the Chinese economy is about to collapse. I would expect the US economy to achieve virtual bankruptcy like the Russian Empire did, well before the Chinese economy, but we'll see.

China will probably go. In simple terms, it's recent prosperity in manufacturing cheaper commodity items, is based on a very cheap labour force. As that labour force increases its discretionary disposable income, it will simply absorb China's own commodity production. At the same time, China imports its food and is not increasing domestic food production. This is unsustainable in the long run. The Uighur rebellions are already going on in the poor food production provinces, which are generally controlled by the PLA, for food security reasons.

China was made up of separate states with different warlords, as late as 1948. Let us pretend that China breaks up into rich and poor food production provinces. Let us pretend that the PLA decides to take back rich provinces using military force. Let us pretend the rest of the world blockades the PLA doing this. In such a scenario, the PLA needs military islands in the Sth China sea to stop western blockades. I suggest this is a more plausible reason for building those islands than China blocking western food deliveries to China.

Tom Palven wrote:In searching for that article, however, I found a bunch of other recent articles saying that the Chinese economy is about to collapse. I would expect the US economy to achieve virtual bankruptcy like the Russian Empire did, well before the Chinese economy, but we'll see.

China will probably go. In simple terms, it's recent prosperity in manufacturing cheaper commodity items, is based on a very cheap labour force. As that labour force increases its discretionary disposable income, it will simply absorb China's own commodity production. At the same time, China imports its food and is not increasing domestic food production. This is unsustainable in the long run. The Uighur rebellions are already going on in the poor food production provinces, which are generally controlled by the PLA, for food security reasons.

China was made up of separate states with different warlords, as late as 1948. Let us pretend that China breaks up into rich and poor food production provinces. Let us pretend that the PLA decides to take back rich provinces using military force. Let us pretend the rest of the world blockades the PLA doing this. In such a scenario, the PLA needs military islands in the Sth China sea to stop western blockades. I suggest this is a more plausible reason for building those islands than China blocking western food deliveries to China.

Once upon a time the US was the world's greatest producer of manufactured goods. A sign saying TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES was installed on a Delaware River bridge in Trenton, NJ in 1935 and is still there.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Trenton_Bridge

Now, the US economy is largely based on services; financial services including banking and insurance, retail services, etc.

It seems to me that China would have more stability with its hard assets; factories, assembly lines, and so on, than the US might have with banking and insurance services which in some ways seem to reflect what Marx called "fictitious capital," more than hard assets.

Tom Palven wrote:Once upon a time the US was the world's greatest producer of manufactured goods. Now, the US economy is largely based on services; financial services including banking and insurance, retail services, etc.

Well I have a weird opinion about that. In 1950's science fiction books, increased technological production would allow workers to only work 2 days a week. That didn't happen. Instead we work 5 &1/2 days a week doing useless things because economics needs some sort of measurement to pay humans.

Tom Palven wrote:In searching for that article, however, I found a bunch of other recent articles saying that the Chinese economy is about to collapse. I would expect the US economy to achieve virtual bankruptcy like the Russian Empire did, well before the Chinese economy, but we'll see.

China will probably go. In simple terms, it's recent prosperity in manufacturing cheaper commodity items, is based on a very cheap labour force. As that labour force increases its discretionary disposable income, it will simply absorb China's own commodity production. At the same time, China imports its food and is not increasing domestic food production. This is unsustainable in the long run. The Uighur rebellions are already going on in the poor food production provinces, which are generally controlled by the PLA, for food security reasons.

China was made up of separate states with different warlords, as late as 1948. Let us pretend that China breaks up into rich and poor food production provinces. Let us pretend that the PLA decides to take back rich provinces using military force. Let us pretend the rest of the world blockades the PLA doing this. In such a scenario, the PLA needs military islands in the Sth China sea to stop western blockades. I suggest this is a more plausible reason for building those islands than China blocking western food deliveries to China.

Once upon a time the US was the world's greatest producer of manufactured goods. A sign saying TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES was installed on a Delaware River bridge in Trenton, NJ in 1935 and is still there.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Trenton_Bridge

Now, the US economy is largely based on services; financial services including banking and insurance, retail services, etc.

It seems to me that China would have more stability with its hard assets; factories, assembly lines, and so on, than the US might have with banking and insurance services which in some ways seem to reflect what Marx called "fictitious capital," more than hard assets.

Big headlines at the top of the opinion page in today's Times-Union (Jacksonville, Florida) say America's Economy Stays on its Roll and talks about Wall Street reports, etc.

However, huge headlines on the front page say BIG CUTS AT CSX which is a railroad giant headquartered in Jacksonville.

So, we'll just have to wait and see how all this plays out, and with Trump the joker in the deck, all bets are off.

So we will. My gut instinct for a long time is that, like Japan in the 1990s and Korea in the early 2000s, China would reach the natural growth limits imposed by its particular mixture of government and private enterprise. So I've been expecting stagnation in China for some years. It now looks as if it may have arrived.

A decade ago, I read American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips. I no longer have this book, but I may try to find it and reread it:

This book talks about the natural development of economies from agricultural to manufacturing, then to finance and service. Phillips was arguing that a finance/service based economy is moribund. Maybe so, but it can take a long time to die. The UK doesn't look like collapsing any time soon, nor does the US. But if we get competition from China in the financial part (and Hong Kong looks formidable to my uneducated eye), we may both go under much sooner.

"Relieve yourself of the illusion that you're writing for the ages. The ages will decide who is doing that on their own; you don't get a vote."

Still, a couple of Chinese professors I know tell me that the Three Gorges Dam is something of a boondoggle, built on a very flimsy geological foundation, and in any case will not bring the benefits it was supposed to. Building dams has been a major mistake of both the Russians (who destroyed the Aral Sea that way) and the Egyptians (who let the Russians build the Aswan Dam after John Foster Dulles got them thoroughly pissed off at the Americans). As a result, the Nile no longer floods in the spring, and evaporation from Lake Nasser has made the climate even more arid than it was before.

"Relieve yourself of the illusion that you're writing for the ages. The ages will decide who is doing that on their own; you don't get a vote."

Tom Palven wrote:The link to the Reuters article in the above post no longer works. Reuters news is on my favorites bar and I take a glance at their headlines every morning. That article was headlined Chinese Economy Shines.

In searching for that article, however, I found a bunch of other recent articles saying that the Chinese economy is about to collapse.

I would expect the US economy to achieve virtual bankruptcy like the Russian Empire did, well before the Chinese economy, but we'll see.

Which gives me an idea: Let's have a lottery on this. We could make millions taking bets! I'm guessing the Chinese will go under almost simultaneously with the US, since the two are very much "into" each other.

There are much better historians on this board than I, but I'm interested in what people think about the commercial rivalry between the British Empire and Germany before the Great War. A lot of British business people were talking about how British industry would profit from the destruction of German trade. Well, they did succeed in impoverishing Germany. But they forgot that they themselves traded with the Germans, and when the Germans could no longer buy their goods, British industry suffered, enough to provoke a general strike in 1926 and lead to a general lowering of the British standard of living. I see the "America First" attitude of Trump and his supporters leading to a similar outcome. Unless you allow your rival a share of the profits, he can't buy your goods. You can't attack one side of a trading partnership without hurting the other.

Anyway, have at me, folks. If I'm wrong about this, I want to know it before I embarrass myself elsewhere.

"Relieve yourself of the illusion that you're writing for the ages. The ages will decide who is doing that on their own; you don't get a vote."

Tom Palven wrote:The link to the Reuters article in the above post no longer works. Reuters news is on my favorites bar and I take a glance at their headlines every morning. That article was headlined Chinese Economy Shines.

In searching for that article, however, I found a bunch of other recent articles saying that the Chinese economy is about to collapse.

I would expect the US economy to achieve virtual bankruptcy like the Russian Empire did, well before the Chinese economy, but we'll see.

Which gives me an idea: Let's have a lottery on this. We could make millions taking bets! I'm guessing the Chinese will go under almost simultaneously with the US, since the two are very much "into" each other.

There are much better historians on this board than I, but I'm interested in what people think about the commercial rivalry between the British Empire and Germany before the Great War. A lot of British business people were talking about how British industry would profit from the destruction of German trade. Well, they did succeed in impoverishing Germany. But they forgot that they themselves traded with the Germans, and when the Germans could no longer buy their goods, British industry suffered, enough to provoke a general strike in 1926 and lead to a general lowering of the British standard of living. I see the "America First" attitude of Trump and his supporters leading to a similar outcome. Unless you allow your rival a share of the profits, he can't buy your goods. You can't attack one side of a trading partnership without hurting the other.

Anyway, have at me, folks. If I'm wrong about this, I want to know it before I embarrass myself elsewhere.

The modern global economy is far more integrated than it was at the end of the colonial era. On the one hand, that means that major collapses tend to be felt everywhere, but OTOH, they tend to be less devastating overall.

There are some caveats to the above - I haven't seen any dissection of it yet, but most of Africa was little affected by 2008. Many economies grew at about 3.5% throughout the stagnation.

Other countries fared better than USA and Europe because they went Keynesian* (Aussies cut everybody a check, Canada went with a {!#%@} of infrastructure spending, Iceland let the banks fail and jailed the banksters. . .)